In a multi-cell radio communication network with a tight frequency reuse, the performance of a cell-edge users may be severely degraded by inter-cell interference. To improve the performance, an interference-aware receiver is considered in emerging wireless communication standards such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). An interference-aware receiver can jointly detect both serving and interfering signals in order to generate reliable soft information of the serving signal. Typically, a maximum likelihood (ML) detector can be used in the receiver. This detector resembles a multi-user detector (MUD) for uplink reception at a base station (BS). The MUD can achieve the optimum bit error rate (BER) close to the single-user BER bound. This performance increase usually requires higher computational costs. Hence, a low-complexity ML MUD is desired to improve the performance in an interference-limited scenario.